Yahoo NewsPolice in Washington state shot a man to death who threw rocks at them,
officials said on Wednesday, as a video published online appearing to
show the incident drew criticism of the officers' actions.

Thursday, February 12, 2015

A 3-year-old LeBleu Settlement child died at a local hospital Monday
night following an accidental shooting at her home on Arsene Road,
authorities said.

Family members have identified the child as
3-year-old Alexis Mercer. "This is a moment as a Sheriff
that I have to tell people, you have got to protect our children," said
Calcasieu Parish Sheriff Tony Mancuso in an interview with KPLC.

Mancuso
said the father had been cleaning his guns in the living room that day,
while his wife and children were gone, and he did not put them up
before leaving for work. When the mother returned home with the three
children, ages 1-3, the 3-year-old girl was able to get one of the
loaded guns, accidentally causing the gun to fire.

With a flurry of national incidents calling attention to legislation
surrounding the right to bear arms, gun ownership and gun rights
advocacy has been at the center of debate. Between the staggering reports of gun violence in cities like Chicago, and the number of mass shootings throughout the year, gun control has become a major issue nationwide.

But Americans are still facing off on either side of the gun debate, and a new study suggests that gun owners and supporters of legislation in favor of carrying concealed weapons are more likely to be racist.

The
report is extremely relevant, based on recent findings that
African-Americans are disproportionately affected by gun violence. According to a 2012 study by the Children's Defense Fund,
gun violence is the leading cause of death for black males ages 15-19.
In 2008 and 2009, black children and teenagers were 15 percent of the
nation's population, however, they accounted for 45 percent of young
people killed by guns.

“White
Americans oppose gun control to a far greater extent than do black
Americans, but whites are actually more likely to kill themselves with
their guns than be killed by someone else. So why would you keep them?”
O'Brien said in a press release. “We decided to examine what social and psychological factors predict gun ownership and opposition to gun control.”

In a ruling issued today, a Federal judge has declared that the
longstanding ban on gun dealers selling handguns to residents in
different states is not only unconstitutional under the Second
Amendment, but also violates other fair trade provisions of the United
States Constitution. The full decision is available here,
but from what I can tell this looks to be a major win for the Citizen’s
Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms. Louis Bonham, one of
TTAG’s consulting lawyers, wrote the following analysis of the ruling:

The suit was brought by a Texas gun dealer, two District of Columbia
residents, and the Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms. In
what appears to have been a test case, the DC residents wished to
purchase a handgun from the Texas dealer, but federal law prohibited
them from doing so without having the Texas dealer ship the gun to DC’s
only FFL, who would have charged them a $125 transfer fee.

In a press conference, Hicks' wife of seven years, Karen, said she "never would have expected this." She said that the shooting had nothing to do with race or religion, and everything to do with parking problems.

"This
incident had nothing to do with religion or victims’ faith but instead
had to do with the longstanding parking disputes that my husband had
with the neighbors," she said, choking back tears. "He often champions
on his Facebook page for the rights of many individuals. Same sex
marriages, abortion, race, he just believes that everyone is equal.
Doesn’t matter what you look like or who you are or what you believe."

She said she didn't know what drove Hicks to allegedly shoot three
people, but her lawyers said that the suspect didn't single out the
victims and had problems with other neighbors in the past. Hicks'
ex-wife, Kristen, told The Huffington Post that she hadn't "heard from
or seen him in 10 years," and had no further comment.Still, the father of two victims, Dr. Mohammad Abu-Salha, believes hate led to the killings."It
was execution style, a bullet in every head," he told the News
Observer. "This was not a dispute over a parking space; this was a hate
crime. This man had picked on my daughter and her husband a couple of
times before, and he talked with them with his gun in his belt. And they
were uncomfortable with him, but they did not know he would go this
far."

Clark County Sheriff Joe Lombardo, sworn in last month, is on record
wanting to scuttle the long-standing handgun registry in Las Vegas. (Photo: LVMP)

Guns dot com suggested by George Jefferson with the following comment: "While it is likely that background checks will pass in Nevada,we still hope for positive change."

Las Vegas area gun owners may soon be able to disregard the county’s
67-year-old blue card program, the only one of its kind in the state,
which requires registration of handguns.

Implemented in 1948,
when the area was frequented by notorious East Coast mobsters such as
Lucky Luciano and Meyer Lansky, Clark County’s mandatory handgun
registry survived a 1989 preemption law by being grandfathered,
effectively making it the only place in Nevada that requires gun
registration. However there is a new sheriff in town and he is ready to
pull the plug on the program.

“I believe that it’s a redundant system,” Sheriff Joe Lombardo told media last fall while he was a candidate for his current office.

With Lombardo now in the driver’s seat, the powerful Republican
Speaker of the state Assembly, John Hambrick, has filed legislation to
run in the relic of Vegas’s bad old days.

Hambrick’s bill, AB 127,
would homogenize gun laws in the state, striking language that exempts
Clark County’s gun registry. Currently the county, with some exceptions,
mandates that
all handguns with a barrel less than 12 inches be registered within 72
hours of being purchased by an area resident. Those who move to the
county and stay more than 60 days likewise have to obtain a blue card –
known as such by its color – from police. Registration involves a
cursory background check and is without fees to the gun owner.

A similar effort in 2013 brought opposition from both Henderson
Police Department and Las Vegas Metro leaders who felt the registry of
some 1.2 million handguns is a valuable investigative tool for law enforcement. Even if the local police agree with the sheriff this time around, there are still other factors at play.

Further, community groups have already gone on record opposing any move to discontinue the registry.

“Is it helping them solve crimes because that was the end goal?”
asked Jocelyn Torres with Progress Now Nevada Action prior to AB 127’s
introduction. “Is it helping them solve crimes that are happening in our
community? I think we would need a little more research, more hard
numbers from them showing why they would want to get rid of it.”

Some interesting points:

1. counties, and presumably cities, can be exempted from state law.
2. mass confiscations did not happen in Clark County.
3. the gun registration has helped in solving crimes.

A New York City police officer has been indicted in the shooting
death of 28-year-old Akai Gurley on Tuesday.

A bullet fired by rookie officer Peter Liang killed Gurley inside the darkened stairwell of the Louis Pink housing project in East New York, Brooklyn, on Nov. 20.

Although
New York Police Department Commissioner William Bratton initially
characterized the shooting as an “accidental discharge,” Brooklyn
District Attorney Ken Thompson announced in December that he was
convening a grand jury to investigate Gurley’s death.

On the night of Nov. 20, Gurley and his girlfriend, 27-year-old
Melissa Butler, left Butler’s seventh-floor apartment inside the
housing project. The pair tried to take the elevator but it wasn’t
working, so they entered the building’s stairwell. The building’s
superintendent had requested that the New York City Housing Authority
fix the lights in the stairwell months earlier, but when Gurley and
Butler entered, it was still dark.

Just as they entered the
stairwell, two first-year police officers -- Liang and his partner,
Shaun Landau -- entered from the eighth floor. The two cops were
conducting a “vertical patrol,” in which officers walk the stairs of
public housing buildings in an attempt to prevent crime.

According
to multiple reports, Liang was carrying his gun in one hand and a
flashlight in another, when he opened the door to the stairwell. At that
moment, a bullet was fired from Liang’s gun, striking Gurley in the
chest. Gurley managed to get down two flights of stairs before
collapsing on the fifth floor, where a neighbor called 911 and Butler
tried to administer first aid.

Gurley, who had a 2-year-old
daughter, was pronounced dead at the hospital. He had been planning to
surprise his mother in Florida for Thanksgiving the following weekend.

According to the Daily News report
from December, both a commanding officer and an emergency operator
frantically tried to reach Liang and Landau after the 911 call, but the
two officers didn’t respond to the calls for six and a half minutes.
During that time, according to the paper, Liang was texting his police
union representative.

Tuesday, February 10, 2015

The Senate Finance committee also killed Senator Favola’s bill to
take away gun rights for certain misdemeanors, SB 943. Senator Favola
has vowed to bring up her bill on the Floor of the Senate and attempt to
get funding for it there, so we will have to keep an eye on it for the
the next few days.

Before the ink was even dry on the 2008 Heller decision, the gun
lobby began to agitate for an extension of this Second Amendment right
to keep a gun in the home for self-defense to carrying concealed weapons
outside the home as well. The CCW movement, as it is called, spread
throughout the United States but with the exception of five states --
AK, AR, AZ, VT, WY. The residents of all the other 45 states must
receive a permit for CCW that is separate from any licensing required
simply to own a gun.

It's estimated
that somewhere around 10 million people now have CCW permits, or
roughly 10 percent of the people who admit to legal ownership of guns.
To listen to the gun lobby you would think that armed citizens are
responsible for the continued decline in violent crime, even though it's
anyone's guess as to how many people are actually walking around armed
each day. In 2013, roughly 450 people used guns in what is referred to as "justifiable homicide," while that same year at least 500 people accidentally killed
themselves or others with guns. The FBI and CDC numbers may be a
little off, but this is the only apples-to-apples comparison that can be
made about whether guns help us or hurt us -- and please don't waste my
time with the nonsense about how millions of crimes are prevented each
year by people walking around with guns.

This hasn't stopped the NRA from endlessly screaming
that "good guys" with guns will always stop "bad guys" with guns to the
point that the movement to issue everyone a CCW license has now begun
to shift to the idea that we should be able to walk around with guns,
concealed or unconcealed at our option, with no licensing required at
all. Called "constitutional carry," as opposed to "concealed carry,"
the loudest and most active proponents of this new credo can be found
in the Lone Star State where this nutty idea sprang from a group of
dissident NRA members who took issue with the gun organization's refusal
to back the open carry of handguns. And the result was a series of
guerrilla-theater events at which these dopes paraded
outside and inside stores and fast-food franchises toting their ARs and
AKs to show that they had the constitutional right to behave like
jerks.

Harris-Perry looked at Holder and said, “You once said the worst day
in office was the day that you had to walk through the bloodied
aftermath” following the heinous attack on Sandy Hook Elementary. She
said, “Children were slaughtered in their classrooms and we have not
made any meaningful progress on changing the access to guns in this
country. Are we a nation of cowards when it comes to guns?”

Holder responded:

Well, I’ll say this, [walking through the school] was the
worst day I had as Attorney General. It is, I think the single failure
that I point to in my time as Attorney General, that I was not able to…
convince Congress to really follow the will of the American people —
which was to enact meaningful, reasonable, gun safety measures. The gun
lobby simply won.

Holder went to say he does not believe America is a “nation of
cowards,” but he does believe “members of Congress need to have a little
more backbone and stand up to what is a distinct minority, even within…
the NRA.”

Ferguson police are testing new
methods of incapacitating suspects — six months after a highly
controversial police shooting involving one of their officers.

This week,
five instructors for the Missouri city’s police department are training
to use a "less lethal" device, called the Alternative, which has enough
force to knock a suspect to the ground but not kill him or her.

The Alternative is
a small orange device that attaches to the top of a normal handgun and
extends a Ping-Pong-ball-sized projectile in front of the muzzle.

After
traveling through the barrel, the bullet embeds itself inside the alloy
projectile, and the docking unit immediately detaches from the weapon,
according to the manufacturer.

This
process decreases the bullet's velocity and dampens its impact. The
bullet, then, should not pierce a human’s skin and cause the type of
internal damage that would kill the person. However, it retains enough
blunt force to knock someone over and deliver severe, debilitating pain.

Christian
Ellis, founder and CEO of Alternative Ballistics, says Ferguson police
reached out to him after an extensive Google search.

“After
the Michael Brown shooting, they were very concerned about taking lives
and making sure that they are proactive,” he said in an interview with
Yahoo News. "These guys are taking it very seriously. They really like
the technology, and I think they are doing the right thing by giving
their officers more tools so they can deal with deadly force encounters
in different ways."

"I'm sick of this woman and her 'don't touch my kid regardless what
he/she did or will do again' attitude," he wrote in a thread on
TexasCHLForum.com, according to Talking Points Memo. "Perhaps a good
paddling in school may keep me from having to put a bullet in him
later."

The bill, HB567: Corporal punishment in schools, was proposed in December and has not been scheduled for a vote.The gun-rights organization opposes the legislation and seems to explain Cotton's brazen comments.Though the bill doesn't specifically address guns, TexasCHLForum states
that the inability to curb bad behavior among children at an early age
will lead to increased criminal activity. That could then lead gun
owners to need to use their weapons for self-defense.

A high school football player allegedly shot his classmate in the
face and posted a photo of himself with the teen's dead body, according
to police near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Maxwell Marion Morton,
16, has been charged as an adult with first-degree murder, and
allegedly confessed to police in the killing of 16-year-old Ryan Mangan
in Jeannette, according to the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review.

Another boy allegedly received the photo from Morton via Snapchat and saved a screenshot
of it before the picture automatically deleted, according to the
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. The boy's mother contacted police after
learning he had a photo of the murder scene.

A man shot six people Saturday afternoon, killing four of them,
including his ex-wife and several children before turning the gun on
himself on a quiet, suburban street west of Atlanta, police and
neighbors said.